The Daily News opinion blog

Main menu

Post navigation

Confessions of a Recovering Racist Homophobe

I was raised to be a racist and a homophobe. No, it wasn’t my parents but a whole society that taught us to see Blacks as not quite like us and to mock and snicker at effeminate men and boys. We were raised to be surprised if we encountered a Black doctor, lawyer or professional. We didn’t understand that our surprise was based on scarcity and the scarcity was based on persecution.

Being young and male in the 50s, gays didn’t have the name gay, but we subjected those whom we perceived as sexually different to all kinds of demeaning slurs. In fact both racism and sexism (which included not just effeminate males but also heterosexual women) were based on fear. White males, just like any other privileged class, thought our privilege was God-given and we had to fight like hell to keep it.

As a young comedian, working coffee houses in Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco and Palo Alto, I did jokes and routines whose memory embarrass me still and would properly end my acceptance in polite society today if repeated. I can hide in shame from my ignorant past or use it to measure the distance of my own journey as my heart has expanded to include a wider and more diverse humanity than my young self perceived.

Yes, used the F word in jokes whose punchline victims were gay. Yes, I have also used the N word–though never as an epithet aimed at a person. In the 50s the children’s rhyme “Ennie Meanie Minnie Moe Catch a Tiger by the Toe” didn’t use the word tiger but the N-word. Agatha Christie’s whodunit Ten Little Indians was originally Ten Little N-words. Only last week I used the N-word when my wife wife asked about Dr. Dre’s old rap group, NWA, and I had to translate.

Time and context are vital in seeing where we are, and this has been an interesting, if mixed, week in our land. Our old enemy racism stuck its ugly head out of the ground and bit Paula Deen, perhaps fatally, while “the love that dared not speak its name,” roared “Yes our name is love!”

We have come a long way in my lifetime. While racism still exists, it is no longer socially acceptable. We are also asked to bury our homophobia and give up bullying and ridiculing people based on their sexuality. We have made amazing progress and we still have very far to go.

The Supreme Court definitely gave mixed signals this week–actively (and inaccurately) denying that race plays a part in keeping people from voting and therefore gutting the Voting Rights Act. The very same week they threw out DOMA and found rights and benefits should not be either granted or withheld based on sexuality.

While the media concentrate on if Paula Deen is a racist, she is not important. It’s most likely the case that she’s neither a hate-filled racist nor a complete innocent. I don’t give her a pass because of her age or her origins–no soft racism of lowered expectations for old white Southerners (or Northerners). The important issue isn’t how she was raised but how far she’s come in understanding our shared American history. It’s not if she used the word 30 years ago, more telling is her fantasy wedding with a plantation theme and Black servants.

Nostalgia for the ante-bellum South is problematic. So too are the sexist assumptions we make about people whose sexuality is different from our own. I think the real issues are about stereotypes and our discomfort. Homophobia, which we tend to imply to mean hatred of homosexuals, is probably rarer than we think. Discomfort is probably a better, more accurate, term. Virulent racism certainly still exists, but of more practical import is a general discomfort between what we inaccurately call the races.

What these two categories share is awkwardness in not knowing how to talk, to joke or where the boundaries are. What’s ok in some circumstances and fatal in others is perplexing and discomforting. We are in a one slip and you’re dead kind of world where we look at words and not intent, where there is little learning, less room for error and only felonies but no misdemeanors.

I can’t say that I don’t have a racist or sexist or homophobic bone in my body. I can say that I’ve come a very long way in accepting and celebrating our diversity of origins and how and whom we love. My generation’s journey will be graded by history with neither an A nor an F. We’ll get what we deserve, an I, for incomplete. But I have faith that our children will get past our old hang-ups and see people as people and feel enriched by our differences instead of feeling fearful, jealous and threatened.

Of course we have all been carefully taught to hate and fear. Yes, when minorities make assumptions about individuals based on race, it is racism.

Jack

Yes, we have come a long way, but we will never be totally without racism in one form or another. A black person can use the N word and it is okay, but a non-black cannot use the word without being chastised by everyone. Why? Because of home exposure? Some of us who were raised in the north never knew there was a “difference” until we moved south and were indoctrinated. Those with stubborn genes were able to resist, but the others went with the flow.

In our attempt to determine the equality of sexes, we have really progressed over the attitude of even ten years ago. However, I do not agree that those with transgender inclinations should be able to use the opposite gender restrooms, particularly when they flaunt their differences to “prove a point”.

Jane

That last sentence says it all. Faith that we are growing and changing for the better.